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LXer Weekly Roundup for 11-Sept-2011

Welcome to this week's collection of big stories from the LXer Newswire. Enjoy!

Linux development temporarily moves to GitHub: Tux Linus Torvalds has published the fifth release candidate of Linux 3.1. As the main server for kernel.org is not completely back up and running after the break-in that was made public last week, Torvalds uploaded the git repository with the mainline Linux sources to GitHub.

The VAR Guy: Does Sold Mean Sold Out?: Several times a month while looking for updates for our Facebook and Twitter feeds, I run across articles by an unknown writer who pens a blog called The VAR Guy. He’s usually Linux and FOSS friendly, but not always. If you don’t know, VAR stands for “value-added reseller,” so sometimes he can understandably turn downright proprietary – right when you least expect it. Mostly, however, he’s pretty fair, or as fair as you can expect someone to be who would profit by getting you to sign up for long term vendor lock-in.

More on Active strategy: We get a lot of questions about Plasma Active, and I'd like to address a few of the more common once in this entry.

The Great Linux Migration: who’s made the move, why, and what’s in store for the future growth of Linux?: Many organizations are navel gazing and assessing ways of increasing productivity and decreasing costs in order to stay afloat in the current business climate. As a company’s IT spend is one of the larger costs of running a business, it makes sense to look closely at how you run your IT shop. Linux may just answer both prayers: offering increased productivity at decreased cost. So why is Linux such a successful solution, which companies have made the switch, and how will the Linux jobs landscape change in the future?

Moving on: "Hue and cry" is one thing at which the Linux and FOSS communities seem to excel. But while wailing and gnashing of teeth might be one of our hallmarks, so is our ability to overcome these missteps and make improvements on existing programs or fork them into new ones. With this in mind, Larry the Free Software Guy looks at the continuing repeated complaints about GNOME 3 -- as well as the seemingly endless "it ain't KDE 3.5" criticism aimed at KDE 4.x -- and finds that neither of these dead horses need to be beaten any longer.

Mainframe Ubuntu Linux?: When you think of “Ubuntu Linux,” you probably think of the community Linux distribution and the Linux desktop. That’s great, but Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, also wants you to think of Ubuntu as a server and cloud operating system platform. To that end, Canonical has been working with IBM to get Ubuntu certified on IBM’s high-end System P Power hardware line and System z mainframes.

Google brings out new programming language: Google has built a brand-new programming language for "structured web programming", one that appears to be suited to browser-based apps. Two of the search giant's engineers will discuss Dart, Google's new language, at the Goto international software development conference next month.

Proposed: A Monthly Ubuntu Release Cycle: There's been a proposal written today for a new Ubuntu release process. Under this proposed process, Ubuntu would abandon its traditional six-month release cycles in favor of monthly releases. Yep, once a month. The benefit of this proposal is that new Ubuntu features wouldn't be forced to land every six months but would land when the given feature is actually mature and ready. This is quite different from Ubuntu's current release process, but this proposal comes from Scott James Remnant, the former Canonical employee and Ubuntu Developer Manager.

LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org drift apart: LibreOffice Logo Michael Meeks, a LibreOffice developer at Novell, compared the codebase of LibreOffice with the OpenOffice.org sources hosted at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). As he writes in a blog post, the differences are already so great that it will now be hard to exchange new code between the two projects. In light of the several million lines of source code by which the two products now differ, he says users should not assume that code committed to Apache OpenOffice.org will "inevitably and automatically appear in LibreOffice". "Instead I suspect we will end up cherry-picking and porting only those things that justify the effort, as/when/if there is any such thing," added Meeks.

LibreOffice Draw -- my new favorite application: I had to generate a report today, one that included a bunch of PDF documents, and I finally figured out how to import PDFs into LibreOffice (with the help of LO's PDF Import extension, which still appears to have Oracle's fingerprints all over it, by the way).